How To Study Your Favuorite Music Producer

What’s good music producers, it’s Curtiss King of airbit.com, here today to explain to you a few ways of how to study your favourite music producers just a tad bit better than you are already.

Music producers, if you’re anything like me, you love to consume behind the beat video footage. I love watching producers get to work, I love seeing them go from, you know something as simple as a weird synthesizer sound and then they warp it and they send it through one of the filters and all of sudden it turns into this other sound and then they add these strings and then they add the drums and then all of a sudden it becomes a groove that I could not even predict. It will become, I love watching those type of videos.

You know, one that I saw recently was for the Travis Scott antidote I watched that particular behind the beat and I’m just like wow, it’s amazing how something that had such an impact with me listening to it, it was just a few instruments. You know, you watched a producer and I think a lot of producers sometimes kind of put on when they do this, but maybe this is kinda his steeze, but he’s kinda of you know, really laid back and was just like you know, I just put this sound, this worked, I got with wundergurl and he was really kinda you know, kinda like lax about it and what I noticed is that there are things that you can study, even amongst those videos. They give you more than enough, cause in this day and age, every producer I feel like has had at least one behind the beat video that’s been up there on YouTube. You know, if you don’t know for yourself, you should be posting those up as a producer, even if you’re just getting started, because whatever you have learned you can teach to somebody else who just got started the day before you.

So, go in with that mentality but one thing that I wanna share with you today, is how to model somebody and I’m gonna use the model or the strategy from the self-proclaimed life strategist and one of my favourite human beings on this earth Tony Robbins, he has this particular 3 step I guess method towards modelling someone else’s success. Now that doesn’t mean trying to lift somebody else’s life, it doesn’t mean anything else except for trying to model the particular thing that you think is great about them, you can do this with your friends, your family. You model the thing that is great about them and you model it for yourself into where you may not have the same exact results, but you can at least step your level up and you can at least step your skill level up. Here’s the things that you wanna pay attention you. Tony Robbins breaks it down into 3 different points of focus.

Now, the first thing that you wanna try to figure out is a human beings belief system. Now, if you figure out this producer who’s sitting down there, they’re making the beats and when they say things like you know when I put my 808s I gotta make sure that these things hit hard. I gotta make sure everything I got just hits hard. If it’s not slapping then I don’t wanna be no parts of it, it has to. So, his belief system is that a beat is not sufficient enough if it does not have a certain level of rumble in the 808s, does it have a certain level of strength in the drums or strength in the actual composition itself or the expression of sound. It has to be hard for him.I have to pause thear, but you get what I’m saying. So, that’s his particular belief system, his or her, cause it could be female producers as well, they, you know, it may be somebody who sits there and as they’re playing the keys, they say you know, I always try to figure out you know, what emotion do I wanna evoke and it has to be something where, at the end of every chord progression, you know, there’s sort of a stamp on the end of that. You don’t have to know any music theory to understand that concept that you know if you have a melody that goes… you know where to go from there once you hear the first few notes. So, if that is the belief system, start there.

The second thing you wanna understand, mental syntax. Follow me, syntax is basically the order in which somebody does something. So, if you have somebody who is making a beat and they say, I always start off with the kicks and the snares, or I always start off with the piano melody or I always start off with some pads or some pretty chords. You follow that particular system, that particular order I should say and you figure out you know, once you understand the belief system, you’ll understand why they choose the order they choose. If somebody is heavy into 808’s, they’re probably gonna do very minimal with the melodies, because they wanna get to those 808’s. So, that being said, figure out the mental syntax.

The third thing that you wanna figure out and sometimes it’s the most overlooked, but one of the most important is study their physiology. Okay, when I say physiology, study the way that they use their body when they’re making a beat. Now, obviously, you know, we don’t always get the most accurate depiction of somebody when they were making the beat, but if you happen to catch a producer who’s in the groove and maybe they recorded this particular beat as this producer was working and as it was coming to you know, coming together and it ends up being a hit, study that video. You know, those behind the scenes or behind the song videos, you see of Kanye West, look at his body, look at the way he’s moving. Even when you think about Fade to Black with Jay-Z and he was showing you sort of how he kinda sits there and lets the thoughts come back to him. You know, he’s not jumping around trying to get lyrics and trying to figure things out, he’s letting it come to him because he knows that too many distractions, probably are gonna mess around with the flow of his lyrics and the fact that he’s not writing down, he’s just doing this. This is part of his physiology.

So, understand the physical nature so if you got a producer who just kinda sits like this, you know and they make laid back beats, you kinda understand why they sit like that and they make up you know, laid back beats. But if you get a producer who, they got the head nod, and they’re doing it, I know it may sound silly, but just duplicate it and do it for yourself, see what it makes you feel. Because if you believe what somebody believes, you know if you do it in the order that they do it in, and if you assume their physiology, if you assume their physical stance, you will be able to n some level duplicate that success.

I highly, highly suggest it. It’s something that I do with my favourite producers. It’s something that I do when I, any walk of life. If you got you know, a friend that’s just really good at making friends, you should do the same thing. Model their belief system, model their mental syntax or the order and system and then at the same time you know, model their physiology and you’ll understand it. You know, if you can understand you know why somebody does all the things they do, you would feel the way they feel and if you understand their belief system, you would know how they did what they did. So, that being said, follow those 3 things, keep it in mind, you know. Try not to over think it or be like Curtiss, why you throwing syntax at me? We talking about beats man. Try not to get too frustrated with it, try it out. Let me know how you think of it.